


this world's nothing more than a magic show (tragic at times and encased in woe)

by justimpolite



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-5x10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:03:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justimpolite/pseuds/justimpolite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t talk to the Machine.</p><p>She knows what it’s done, what it’s taken. Harold tells her a few days after it happens. He avoids making eye contact and stutters out a few choice words such as, ‘it makes sense,’ and, ‘I think it’s what she would have wanted.’ Shaw had just looked straight ahead, trying to even out her breathing before saying, ‘you can make sure to tell that thing not to bother talking to me. Ever.’</p><p>or</p><p>Samaritan falls and Shaw is forced to face her grief</p>
            </blockquote>





	this world's nothing more than a magic show (tragic at times and encased in woe)

**Author's Note:**

> i started this after 5x10 and kept putting off finishing it, but wanted to get it done before the finale this week so hopefully that explains why it might feel a little rushed towards the end. it was also pretty therapeutic getting this out as i have a LOT of feelings regarding root that i'm still not sure how to process.
> 
> as with my last shaw fic, i've tried to do my best to keep her in character and respect her as a neurodivergent character. i found this more difficult than last time as i struggled with the balance between expressing her grief and keeping her true to her character. so do let me know if any of it feels off. also i haven't finished anything since october so i am rusty as hell.
> 
> the title was taken from zack hemsey's 'waiting between worlds'

 Samaritan falls.

There are casualties. John doesn’t make it, taking a bullet for Fusco who still ends up in the ICU anyway. Shaw’s there when it happens, rushing over to John and checking again and again to see if there’s anything she can do, but they both know it’s useless.

‘Look after them,’ he croaks, blood gathering at the corner of his rapidly paling lips.

‘I will,’ she says, resting a hand on his shoulder. Neither of them were ever good at providing comfort, but she can do this for him.

He’s gone a few seconds later. She closes his eyes.

 

 

 

Two hours later she puts a bullet in Greer’s head and doesn’t feel a damn thing.

 

 

 

She doesn’t go to John’s burial. Not that there’s anything to bury. The Samaritan headquarters had been burned to the ground in the midst of it all, any bodies of the fallen lost within it, turned to ash. They bury an empty casket and she decides she doesn’t need to see it. Instead she finds herself at a bar on Sixth, one she’d come to with Reese after working one of their first numbers together, and orders their house beer on tap. It tasted like piss, but she remembers the way he’d talked it up whilst she scoffed into her own drink.

She lifts her glass, tilts it slightly and mutters, ‘Reese. You were a real partner.’ She downs the remains of the glass and slams it onto the bar. ‘But don’t let that get to your head.’

The next morning she ends up visiting his grave anyway, Bear tugging on his lead as he whimpers intermittently, as if he knows where they are. She stands there for a few minutes before heading North across the cemetery to Carter’s tombstone. There are fresh peonies beside it.

‘He did you proud,’ she says gruffly. ‘He did good.’

She looks out at the city skyline and catches sight of an elderly man nearby placing lilies on an aged tombstone. A kid passes by on his red bicycle, and a bird pecks around in the dirt at the foot on an old oak tree.

She feels it. The pull to make her way over to the North side of the cemetery. She didn’t go to the burial, but she knows where it is. She considers it for a brief moment, wonders if it will bring comfort; if it will bring anything. But she knows it won’t. She’ll stare down at a fresh grave, with no name and no mark to say Root was even there.

Well she wasn’t, not really.

Shaw doesn’t believe in anything. No God, no story, no machine. But she knows that everything that was Root disappeared the second she died in that hospital room.

She tugs a reluctant Bear along and through the main cemetery gates.

She’s had enough of the dead for one day.

 

 

 

She doesn’t sleep. For the first few days, at least. There are still rogue Samaritan agents around, and The Machine still rolls out numbers. Shaw throws herself into it, her body thrumming with energy whenever she pulls the trigger on the kneecaps of a guy in badly-fitting suit, or cheap ski-mask in a shitty robbery gone wrong. When they’re taken care of, she heads to whatever dive-bar or diner she can find and fills up on bad whiskey and even worse coffee.

After a few days she can’t put it off any longer and falls asleep in a car – she doesn’t remember how she got inside, but knows it’s not hers. She catches brief hours of sleep in vehicles, the subway, or even in the park. She’s usually too drunk or run-down to dream, which is just how she wants it.

One night, after taking a clumsy bullet to the shoulder, she passes out from exhaustion once Fusco has safely returned her to the subway.

She dreams of dark fingernails scratching along her back and a low voice in her ear.

When Harold comes to check on her the following morning, Shaw’s already gone. 

 

 

 

She doesn’t talk to The Machine.

She knows what it’s done, what it’s taken. Harold tells her a few days after it happens. He avoids making eye contact and stutters out a few choice words such as, ‘it makes sense,’ and, ‘I think it’s what she would have wanted.’ Shaw had just looked straight ahead, trying to even out her breathing before saying, ‘you can make sure to tell that _thing_ not to bother talking to me. Ever.’

The Machine, it would seem, had respected her wishes. If ever it needed to pass information along, it would tell one of the others, who would in turn pass it on to Shaw. Fusco would look vaguely uncomfortable whereas Harper would relay the message in a direct manner, with no reason to tiptoe around the issue. Shaw appreciates it more than she can express.

The Machine gives them what they need, and Shaw carries out what they’re instructed to. She’s taken to taking her comm-link out during missions, which Harold chastises her for endlessly, particularly when she receives shallow knife-wound to her side without the Machine in her ear to warn her about the approaching perp.

She stitches herself up and tries not to think about the fact that she’d apparently rather be cut to pieces than hear the voice that hunk of omniscient junk has stolen.

 

 

 

Two weeks go by before Harold manages to get her alone.

She’d been taking a few minutes to rest her aching body in the subway between numbers, scratching at Bear’s ear when she’d picked up on the familiar three-piece rhythm of Finch and his cane.

He didn’t look surprised to see her, no doubt the Machine had mentioned her presence to him. He spares her a glance before continuing on to his desk, shuffling around some papers.

‘Ms. Shaw, I am pleased to hear that your last number was dealt with efficiently, but there is no need for you to wait around. Detective Fusco and Mr Durban are already working on the next one.’ He looks over, noting the way she’s slumped against the old wooden bench. ‘Perhaps you might benefit from a rest.’

‘I’m fine here.’

‘Well, there’s a perfectly acceptable bed over by the service tunnel-.’

‘No.’

He sobers, his back straightening, realising perhaps whose bed he just offered up. He’s quiet for a while longer, before clearing his throat in a way that, despite its low volume, is deafening to Shaw.

‘Sameen,’ he starts, tentatively. ‘I know that you are grieving. We all are. But you have to take care of yourself. Do you think Ms. Groves would want you to-.’

‘Root.’

He blinks slowly behind his glasses.

‘Her name is Root. Was Root. And you don’t know a damn thing about what she would want. What she _did_ want – wanting to help, to use your stupid machine to save us all – that got her killed in the end. You didn’t care about what she wanted then. Don’t act like you care now.’

Her chest rises and falls from the exertion of spitting out all that she’d been keeping in for the last few weeks. Harold doesn’t visibly react, just continues to stare down at her. She notices he still has his earpiece in, and doesn’t need three guesses to figure out who he’s listening to.

‘You blame me,’ he says simply. ‘You think if I had set Her free earlier, if I had listened to Root, then she would still be here. Maybe John too.’

Shaw doesn’t break his gaze.

‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe if I had done that, they would both still be here and we would be alive and free. Or maybe they would still have died. Perhaps it would have been yourself, or myself, or Detective Fusco. A billion different endings could have transpired, the Machine has accounted for this, but the fact that we won, that we beat Samaritan at all, the chances were almost impossible. I share the exact same thoughts and fears on the matter as you Ms. Shaw, but their deaths aided in bringing about our ability to save the world from Samaritan, and it would be a disservice to Ms. Groves and Mr Reese to diminish their sacrifices in that way.’

Bear sits between the two of them, glancing back and forth, sending the tension. Harold doesn’t turn away, but swallows thickly. Shaw’s hands shake against their purchase on the bench.

‘Say it,’ Harold demands. ‘She’s already told me, but you should say it.’

‘It should have been you.’ Her voice is even. Strong, even. ‘Root and Reese believed, more than any of us, that we could do this. They were the best of us. And Carter. You created a weapon and then you humanized it and then you chained it up. It chose Root as its-, its fucking prophet and then discarded her. I don’t believe for a second that your God couldn’t see a way out for her. Root did everything it ever asked – that you ever asked – and then the both of you let her die for you. If any of us were going to die for you and your creation, it should have been you. It should have been you or-.’

‘Or you?’

Silence hangs heavy between them.

‘If you have decided that John and Detective Carter were the heroes. Root, a prophet turned martyr, and myself the father of a monster, then,’ he tightens his grip on his cane. ‘Who, Sameen, are you?’

She finally stands, shortening the distance between them and coming to a stop inches away from him. She stares him evenly in the eye.

‘I’m no one who matters.’

She brushes passed him, not above giving him a brief shoulder check, and is almost out the door when he calls out.’

‘Root knew.’

She freezes.

‘Root knew what was going to happen to her. She made her decision.’

Her nails dig into the palm of her hand, sharp and grounding.

‘It may not be a fact you are happy about, but it’s one you must accept.’

‘Like hell I do,’ she snarls, slamming the door behind her.

 

 

She manages to make it three blocks before she vomits into a nearby trashcan. Her hands don’t stop shaking for the next three hours.

 

 

 

A few days before, Fusco had handed a set of keys over to her.

‘It’s your new place,’ he’d said in response to her raised brow. ‘Courtesy of our robot friend. I know you don’t like talking to it, I’m not exactly going nuts over it myself, but, no offense, from the look and smell of you, you could do with a half-decent place to crash.’

As unwilling as she was to accept anything from the Machine, she was growing very tired of not having a place to get more than four hours sleep a night. So, with some reluctance, she had followed Lionel’s directions to a small place in a shoddy apartment building and decided she might as well accept. The bed was alright and she wasn’t one to turn down hot water. She didn’t spend time there in the day, if she didn’t have to, but she had to admit it wasn’t awful having a place to go home and crash.

Now, hours after her conversation with Finch, she stares into the dirty bathroom mirror before her. When she was a kid, her dad once took her to a carnival that had come to town. They’d walked through the Hall of Mirrors, and little Sameen had tilted her head in interest at the way her reflection became distorted in various ways. It reflected herself, but not quite.

Shaw had spent endless hours staring back into the eyes of her reflection in the room Samaritan had kept her in. It had grounded her, in a way, reassuring her that she was there, that she was alive. That she hadn’t given up yet.

Now, her reflection is the most unrecognizable it has ever been. She doesn’t look that different physically. She looks older, undoubtedly a result of Samaritan’s endless torture. The bags under her eyes are dark and her cheek bones have become sharper, hollower, but the reflection is still her. Yet somehow it isn’t. It feels off, it feels wrong. Her hand reaches for her neck, a habit she wishes she could break; wishes she’d never had to start, but she finds only soft, unmarked skin. The pads of her fingertips trace her skin and she remembers all the times Samaritan had cut her open there during the simulations. She remembers the way Root’s teeth had sunk into the soft flesh there, like an animal digging into their prey after months of famine. She remembers the moan she had unwillingly released at the feeling.

Her fist flies into the mirror, shattering the glass.

Her knuckles drip blood over the stark white of the bathroom tiles.

She doesn’t care.

 

 

 

Shaw doesn’t like to keep track, doesn’t want to, but when she wakes up one morning she can’t help but _know_ that it’s been a month since it happened.

She doesn’t do anything differently, doesn’t time to think about it, just has it there in the back of her mind; persistent and unforgiving in its reminder.

She takes out some dude attempting to hijack some important tech, and lugs the various hard drives back to the subway for Finch to look at. Fusco’s there too, petting Bear behind his ears. It’s been weeks since Reese had finally clued him in on everything, but he still looks out of place in the space they spent so long keeping from him. He glances at Shaw and then awkwardly looks away.

‘Thank you, Ms. Shaw,’ Harold says as she hands over the takings.

‘That it?’ she asks, already eager to leave. She’s avoided him as much as possible since their last altercation.

Harold shoots Fusco a look, who gives a shrug in return. Harold turns back and gives Shaw a look that makes her tense. Whatever’s coming, she knows she doesn’t want it.

‘I think we all know what day it is. A month since-,’ he trails off. When Harold doesn’t continue, Fusco takes over.

‘I’ve been hanging onto this for a few weeks. Never really felt like the right time, but I guess now is as good as any.’ He reaches into a bag by his feet and pulls out a leather jacket. Shaw clenches her fist. ‘Had to wrangle it away from the hard-asses at the morgue, but-. I figured you might want it.’

Shaw recognises that this is meant as a nice gesture. Root didn’t have a home, officially. She didn’t have any belongings for the cops to know about. As far as they knew, all she had was what was on her at the time. Shaw doesn’t know for sure, but imagines it can’t have been more than what she always had on her – a burner phone, loose change, USB drives that always seemed to get lost within her pockets. Her jacket might as well have been it.

She recognises it as a nice gesture, but this doesn’t stop her from clenching her jaw and making Fusco flinch with the intensity of her glare. A few moments of tense silence follow, until Harold speaks again.

‘She would want you to-.’

Shaw snatches the jacket from Fusco’s grasp and turns on her heel, refusing to let Harold finish that sentence.

 

 

 

It’s been hours since she got back to her apartment and collapsed into the armchair, the jacket caught tightly between her fists. It’s been hours and she hasn’t moved.

Beside the right lapel of the jacket is a tiny hole, no bigger than a few centimetres in size. The bullet had gone clean through and lodged itself in her chest. Such a tiny thing to do such irreparable damage. Shaw had taken her fair share of bullets, they all had. They all had one out there with their name on. She’d been foolish enough to think they had more time to outrun them.

She doesn’t want to think about the bullet. Because that means thinking about Root, which in turn means thinking about when it happened – how it happened – and what those final moments were like. The thought of Root alone, bleeding out in a stuffy hospital is the worst. It pulls on something in Shaw’s chest – something she’s not felt often. Something she doesn’t want to.

But she can’t look away from that tiny, tiny hole. One day, she knows, the sun will burn up. It will burn up and the universe will collapse in on itself, sucked into a dark, dark hole, and all will be gone. Everything that was, everything that is, will cease to be. It won’t matter anymore.

She stares at the bullet hole and thinks maybe she can imagine that all too well.

Before she can talk herself out of it, she’s barging out of her apartment, out of her building, and onto the street. She marches the two blocks she needs to, not giving a shit about the characteristic New York chill of two in the morning, and makes a beeline for the nearest payphone. She yanks the receiver, lifting it to her ear and speaks into it.

‘Did she know? Did you tell her?’

There are a few moments of silence, before a burst of static can be heard, followed by a voice.

‘Sameen.’

She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even think about it. She can’t. She’s too angry.

‘Did she know she was going to die?’

‘I informed her that her number was up,’ Root’s voice says. ‘She accepted that.’

‘And so _you_ just accepted that?’

‘I ran the simulations, there was nothing I could have done. Analogue Interface knew this was the only way.’

‘Fuck you,’ Shaw snarls into the receiver, before slamming it back into place. ‘Fuck you both,’ she spits into the night air.

 

 

 

When she gets back, hours later, with half a bottle of scotch in her system, she’s ready to fall face first into her shitty mattress and crash when she spots the jacket. It’s lying over the back of a chair as if nothing has changed. As if Shaw isn’t fighting the urge to vomit – for several reasons.

‘Why did you do that?’ She slurs at the jacket. ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’

The jacket, of course, doesn’t respond.

‘Seven thousand simulations. They put me through all those simulations and I shot myself every single fucking time because I couldn’t turn that gun on you. All those times and then you can’t even survive one fucking lousy bullet.’ She forms a gun with her finger and thumb, pulling it back to punctuate her words.

‘You were supposed to be special. You were the one who was supposed to survive this. Dammit, Root, you were the only one.’

Her vision is becoming hazy to the point where she slides down to a pitiful crouch, leaning her head against the wall behind her. She sees the bottle of scotch on the table where she left it, but it’s out of reach and she doesn’t trust herself to try and get up again.

‘Root,’ she says. ‘Root. Root.’

She leans forward, reaches for the jacket. She pulls it by one of the arms, knocking the chair over loudly in the process. She grips the material between numb hands, squeezing so tightly her knuckles whiten, splitting a couple of fresh cuts from when she’d smashed her mirror.

If people want her to feel something, she decides, she’ll feel this. This is what they want.

‘I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’

She mutters it over and over again.

The lie tastes like ash in her mouth.

She repeats it as she continues to clutch the jacket. Sometime between realising it still smells faintly of her, and losing the ability to articulate her words, she falls into a fitful sleep. Just before she passes out, she swears she hears a voice coming from somewhere nearby; hers and Hers.

_‘It’s okay, Sameen. It’s okay.’_

She sleeps.

 

 

 

She tries not to actively think of her. It’s easier that way. But sometimes she’ll see or hear something that will send her mind hurtling back to particular moment – perhaps one she thought long forgotten. One time, when walking the city streets at night, she hears the low, booming bassline of a song playing from one of the clubs nearby, and is suddenly accosted by the memory of a similar song playing in Brooklyn after a successful mission. She remembers the way Root’s nails had pinched the skin of her back as Shaw had fucked her hastily in a smoky alleyway, desperate for Root’s breathy sighs.

Another time she ducks into a small diner when the heavens open above and rain pours in buckets, muttering to herself about the state of her soaked clothes and digging around in her pocket to find change for crappy filter coffee to warm herself up. It’s only when she’s taken a hearty gulp of her coffee that she realises she’s been here before, a year or so ago. They’d sat across from one another in the corner booth. Root’s long brown tresses had been tucked behind her left ear, something Shaw’s not sure why she remembers.

(‘Quit staring at me.’

‘No.’

‘I will stab you with this fork.’

‘There’s no need for violence. I simply appreciate a woman with an appetite.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls. Or you would if you didn’t spend all of your goddamn time annoying the shit out of me.’

‘Don’t you feel special, Sameen?’

‘Whatever, just shut up. You’re giving me indigestion.’

‘You’re so good at dirty talk.’)

She drops the change on the counter and figures she’ll risk the rain.

 

 

 

These reminders are constant, but somewhere along the way she learns to cope with them better. They still make her chest tighten and a sense of nausea rise in her throat, but it’s not nearly as overwhelming, and once or twice she’s actually found herself smiling at memories of Root she’d thought long gone.

Things are better with Harold, too, after he’d been caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout involving one of their numbers and taken a bullet to the shoulder. She’d patched him up in silence in the subway. The air was uncomfortable and Harold had refused to meet her gaze.

She’s pulled the final stitch tight and said, almost too low to hear, ‘I’m glad you’re here, Finch.’

He’d appraised her silently for a moment, before offering a tight, though genuine, smile and replying, ‘you too, Ms. Shaw.’

Since then she’s felt more comfortable spending time in the subway. At the moment, Fusco’s out tracking down their latest number and she’s gathering information on them with the help of the Machine and Finch’s endless files. Harold’s had to take breaks from everything more than he used to.

She hasn’t spoken the Machine again, not verbally, since she’d demanded to know about Root. She’s not an idiot, she can separate the voice the machine uses from the woman it used to belong too, but she’d still rather not have to listen to it. Instead, the Machine communicates with her via text message. So when the screen she’s been looking at is interrupted by text, she’s not all that surprised.

SAMEEN.

She rolls her eyes and stretches her arms upwards, relieving some of the tension in her shoulders.

‘What?’

THERE IS SOMETHING I HAVE BEEN KEEPING FOR YOU.

‘A present? For me? You shouldn’t have.’ She’s not sure whether the Machine’s progressed to the point where it can pick up on sarcasm.

I THINK IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO HAVE IT.

‘How thoughtful.’

The next message takes longer to appear, almost as if the Machine is debating with itself.

SHE LEFT SOMETHING FOR YOU.

A MESSAGE.

She freezes.

‘I don’t want it.’

IT WAS IMPORTANT TO HER THAT YOU HEARD IT.

‘Are you not listening to me? I don’t want it,’ she punctuates each word.

There’s a moment where she thinks it’s listened and has given up, letting her get back to work, before the screen blacks out completely.

The voice that follows is the same. Except that it’s not. The monotonous tone is replaced by one that is equally soft and sultry, dripping in a familiarity that causes an ache.

‘Hey, sweetie-.’

She rips the comm-link from her ear and hurls it across the room with such intensity that it smashes upon impact, falling to the floor in a mess of plastic and wires.

She walks out of the subway without looking back.

 

 

 

Later, she’s perched on her bedroom windowsill, looking down at the city. Her eyes are shut as her forehead rests against the cool glass. Bear is asleep in the corner of the room, snoring every so often. It makes her feel better. She’s debating whether to spring for takeout or not when her phone buzzes in her pocket.

‘For once I’d actually like it to be Fusco,’ she mutters.

It’s not.

I AM SORRY.

She stares down at the message as another one came through.

I THOUGHT YOU WOULD WANT TO HEAR IT.

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS ARE DIFFICULT FOR ME TO COMPREHEND SOMETIMES.

BUT YOU WERE SPECIAL TO HER.

I THINK SHE WAS SPECIAL TO YOU TOO.

She’s debating turning her phone off (not that that would stop it, she thinks) when an attachment comes through. She opens it, only to find herself staring at a photo of herself. It’s a little blurry, clearly taken from a security camera, but she can still clearly make out the figures in the photo. She recognises it as being from before she was taken by Samaritan, the night she’d turned Tomas down and gone to meet Root. It was the night she realised that maybe – maybe, she cared a little more than she’d liked to admit. They’d slept together that night, just like they had countless times before, but that time had been different – softer. Even through this blurred picture taken from above, she feels the weight of Root’s tender gaze just like she had that night.

With a beep, the pictures cuts out, alerting her to her phone’s dead battery. She puts the phone back in her pocket and continues staring out the window. She only lasts a few seconds before running her hand over her face and sighing. She hops off the ledge, grabs a nearby jacket and whistles for Bear to follow after her, clipping his lead onto his collar. She shuts her apartment door behind her, and together they descend the staircase and emerge into a dismal, rainy afternoon in New York.

She spots what she’s looking for across the street and feels her feet carrying her towards it before she can convince herself that this isn’t a good idea.

She comes to a standstill, picks up the payphone receiver, takes a deep breath and says, ‘show me.’

The message lasts no longer than a minute. Her voice is low and breathy, but not in the way Shaw had grown accustomed to over the years. It’s clear she was in pain, and the background noise of cops and paramedics makes it obvious that it was recorded after it happened. In the car. Her final conscious moments. Her words are interrupted by coughs and rattling inhales and exhales, but she gets through it. There are moments when it seems like maybe she wanted to say more, but by the end she can barely get her words out.

When it finishes, Root’s voice returns, but colder this time, making it easy for Shaw to differentiate.

‘Would you like to hear it again?’

‘No,’ Sameen says. ‘That was enough.’

She places the receiver back with a gentleness that surprises her and peers down at Bear, who’s been sitting beside her the whole time, waiting.

‘Come on, boy,’ she says. ‘It’s time to go.’

He stands, brushing his snout again Shaw’s leg briefly, before leading the way, pulling on the lead wrapped around Shaw’s fingers. She reaches down and the pulls the zipper of Root’s jacket up. It’s too big for her, but it feels warm and safe.

Safe.

She buries her hands in the deep pockets, fingering the material and rolling her eyes at the hole in the right pocket. Bear leads the way across the road once traffic thins out and together they head up Twenty-Seventh. They weave in and out of the crowd, simultaneously within it and apart from it. They can still be seen for a while, until a group of tourists cross their path. When they finally emerge they’re nothing more than pinpricks in the distance to the payphone, which stands tall and strong.

A symbol of permanence.

 

 

 

‘Hey, sweetie. Hope this isn’t a bad time. I have a pretty strong idea about how this is going to play out for me, so I thought I’d call. No phone, of course, but I trust She’ll pass this on. You’re gonna make it out of this, Sameen. If any of us were meant for what comes after the war, for the gentleness, it was you. You don’t know the things I would do to be there with you, but it’s not meant for everyone. This is always how it was going to go. I meant what I said, about being a symphony. So thank you, Sameen Shaw, for being my favourite song. I never wanted it to end.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

 _'I'd say settle down, of your grief let go_  
_This world's nothing more than a magic show_  
_Though tragic at times and encased in woe_  
_It all works out, of this truth I know'_


End file.
